


honey whiskey

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alcohol, Asexual Henry Cheng, Bees, Boy There's A Lot, Canonical Character Death, Drugs, Implied/Referenced Suicide, It's Dream Thieves but Henry's There, Kavinsky is a content warning, M/M, POV Second Person, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 04:07:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8148631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: He calls it theft and he calls it fun and you have never known anyone like him in your life, so rough and other, and his crooked grin drinks your delight right in. He wouldn’t be so interested in you if you weren’t so interested in him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I hope the only surprising thing about me writing this is that it took this long
> 
> I'm going to dedicate this one 100% to [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) because she is so into Chengsky and she's been so supportive of this fic, I got stuck on it for months but she is patient and wise and gave really good beta-reader feedback and it got done!!

Your first impression of Henrietta is not ‘hotbed of seedy magical artefact trade’. It isn’t even ‘good cover for dealers trying to lay low’. It is that the town is entirely too _short_ , barely staggering out of the skyline, and you assume your mother has brought you to the wrong place.

_“_ This is important,” she tells you. What she means is it’s important to her, but that’s close enough to being the same thing. She leaves you in Henrietta with an uncomfortably new school uniform, the press of her nails from where she’d held your shoulder, and a list of names to watch. Declan Lynch, Richard Gansey, Joseph Kavinsky.

“Find their magic,” she says. “But stay out of their way.”

You assume it will be possible to do both.

 

It seems a slightly incredible co-incidence that all three of the boys you are to watch go to the same school, though it certainly saves you time. You find them all in your first week, as you ingratiate yourself with the other boys from Vancouver, glimpses in hallways, articles in the newsletter, traffic warnings on the radio.

Declan Lynch you find first, because he seems to be everywhere, drifting from group to group around the school, only a year older than you but looking like he was born to wear a Bluetooth. He talks endlessly, like it’s a hobby, words falling from his lips with an ease that you envy, people filling every space in his life that he leaves open.

There’s no doubt in your mind that he’s in the business; he watches windows, watches crowds, keeps his back to the walls in wide-open spaces. No one else seems to notice, but no one else would have watched their mother evolve those traits in less than a year. The practice of it tells you he’s been doing this longer than she has; the wariness you can read on him tells you he’s worse at it. He’ll be waiting for someone like you. You keep your distance.

 

You make the mistake of calling Gansey ‘Richard’ the first time you meet him. He corrects you with an easy, offhand smile, but the error is damning, slotting you neatly in alongside the rest of the school’s courtiers that throng for his attention. He is too polite to ever be unkind, but you know his eyes skip over you, know that you don’t have the same, strange kind of allure that his other friends do. He is wondrous and noble and princely and so used to people trying to get close to him that you don’t know how you could manage it.

It doesn’t matter, anyway. For all that you _want_ Gansey’s attention, you learn fast that you don’t need it. He tends to find relics, not miracles, and then donate them responsibly to museums. Whatever he actually does when he tromps around the Virginia countryside with his friends in the weekends, it awards him notoriety on museum websites instead of pools of illicit cash.

 

Kavinsky, though.

Kavinsky comes to find you as soon as he heard you were asking about him, armed with a smile you don’t trust and a new set of scabs drying on his knuckles. He wears his uniform like it was all he could scavenge in the apocalypse, and his attention feels like crosshairs settling square between your eyes. “I heard you were asking about my shit,” he says. There’s a scar on his lip, and you imagine someone’s fist leaving it, or someone’s teeth. “You looking to buy?”

“Scholarly interest only,” you tell him. It’s a dangerous answer, because Declan Lynch would know to stop talking to you right then. Kavinsky laughs, and it makes him bigger, makes you smaller, sounds like the aftermath of every joke you have ever been on the wrong side of.

“Better people than you have tried to figure what I’m selling,” he says, the glint of his eyes a challenge. You think of RoboBee’s brother, your father swearing _It just shouldn’t work_ , the problem of reverse engineering something that was never engineered. Your heart knocks in your chest, and you think it shouldn’t be this easy, finding an invitation to miracles.

You swallow hard, and his eyes follow the bob of your throat. You say, “I’d still like to see.”

 

_Find their magic but stay out of their way_. It’s sound advice for dealing with Declan, but you’re not sure there’s a single place in Henrietta that hasn’t felt Kavinsky’s hand. The public schools know him in ways Aglionby doesn’t, and the locals have learned to despise him. Even in Gansey’s kingdom, he lives under Ronan’s skin.

Kavinsky does not immediately show you his font of wonders, though you didn’t expect him to. What he does show you is the nightlife, wild youth, the chaos of a hundred-odd underage drinkers and unsupervised pyrotechnics. You wince at every ragged, screeching collision, which marks you as an outsider and makes Kavinsky’s friends snigger.

You think they’re his friends, anyway. They’re bruised and bitten, hazy air concealing the very real danger of them. Their bones are carved the same way as Kavinsky’s, but you can tell, they don’t taste quite the same – they’re hungry, but he was born starving. Oddly, you think you know the feeling. They are ravenous energy turned outward; you’ve spent years with the want in your stomach eating itself. Kin like the boys at Litchfield House are kin, in a different way but just as strong.

You suffer soberly through three ‘substance parties’, which are aptly named if nothing else. You will never be able to separate the scent of alcohol from the acrid tang of bile again, two of Kavinsky’s friends throw up on your shoes on entirely distinct occasions, and every now and then you catch Kavinsky watching you through the crowd and the smoke and the overwhelming clamour that might just be in your head.

It is not fun, being the only sober man at a party, not when you were never great with crowds and noise and the crushing, compacting press of people. But you see cigarettes burning violet like iodine, bottles of some black beer that curls like smoke and drips down chins in wisps, bombs that detonate with a ring of high, predatory laughter. It’s magic, magic, raw and vicious and so unlike your precious bee, it blocks your senses and makes your empty gut ache because you _want_ and you have wanted for so, so long.

It takes three parties and then you’ve earned it, hands on your shoulders, his mouth too close to your ear, the slow, carnivorous whisper, “So you want to know where it comes from?”

 

You are not impressed, the first time you watch Kavinsky take a pill and fall asleep. You’ve seen him take pills before, and you’ve seen him unconscious before, and putting the two together doesn’t really seem any more magical. Even aside from that, you’re in his car in an empty strip mall parking lot, with Skov and Swan smoking on the hood of their Golf two spaces over.

You’d thought your first time with magic would be a little more special.

Instead, you’re watching his gaunt face lit up orange by a distant streetlight, the glow soft enough to be out of place over his sharp features. The track playing changes to something low, whispered aggression crawling out of the speakers, and you fidget with your fingernails while you watch the rise of Kavinsky’s chest to check he hasn’t died. Alone with him while he sleeps – it feels intimate, and you wish it didn’t, wish it was brighter and louder and Kavinsky hadn’t thrown himself into unconsciousness beside you.

Just when you’re starting to wonder how long you’re meant to wait, he wakes up with a violent jerk, enough to shock you back in your seat. He looks victorious as he flips over something in his hands that wasn’t there before, something that looks remarkably like your phone.

You crane your neck for a better look, and a shiver runs through you, the first taste of something dripping tantalizingly down your throat. The phone is unambiguously yours, with the ding on the corner where you dropped it, the battered charm, the Lana Del Ray lock screen. You reach automatically to your pocket, fingers tracing over the dent of _your_ phone, still in place. “A copy?” you ask, trying to connect points A and B. Kavinsky asleep with empty hands, and then – phone. “Where did it come from?”

He raps his knuckles against his temple, drinking in your wonder. “My head,” he says.

“Your forgeries. Your drugs,” you say, feeling possibility swelling up inside you. At some point the laws of physics shifted inside this car, hidden by the snarl of Bulgarian whispers and hazy lighting. Outside, there’s a shout and a thump as Skov or Swan does something unpleasant to the other, but you can’t think beyond the sight of Kavinsky taking a celebratory swig of beer. His prize is likely your expression. Of all the people in the world to get magic, Kavinsky. “Can you make anything?”

He seems to consider, swilling his drink before he replies. “Anything.”

“Can you make...” you start, but everything you’ve seen since you’ve met him is rewriting itself with this explanation. The guns he keeps getting from _somewhere_ , the rocket launcher, the pile of televisions stacked up for sledgehammers in the fairgrounds, the Mitsubishi he’d left on the train tracks, replaced by the one you’re in now, everything no one will say to you about Prokopenko.

Your pause makes him snort, and you get the uncomfortable sense that you’re losing his interest. “Everyone in this town thinks too small,” he drawls, stretching back in his seat.

You bite your lip. Carefully, you bring RoboBee out from your pocket, fingers unfurling slowly to expose it to Kavinsky. It’s your dearest thing, but he’s shown you his magic, and you’re afraid to lose him without showing him yours. You press your thumb to your phone, willing RoboBee to hover an inch over your palm, bright and responsive, and try to ignore the terrible thought of the app working on the copy-phone too. “Can you make something like this?”

He plucks RoboBee from over your hand, holding it by a wing, and you don’t breathe while he turns it over. Something in his face changes, a spark of recognition and challenge, and then he’s grinning again, tossing your little bee back more carelessly than you’d like. “Lynch’s work,” he says, though you don’t know if he means Declan or Niall. He puts another little green pill on his tongue and then he’s gone and you are alone with his body and the itching sensation that something between you is changing in a way you don’t understand.

The music turns sour, lyrics low and vicious, so you turn it off. It’s somewhere past midnight, and you missed Skov and Swan driving away; the universe is Kavinsky’s car, one parking lot, and nothing beyond that feels real. You pick the copy of your phone off Kavinsky’s lap, unlock it with your pin, flick through photos and messages and apps and can’t find a difference to the one in your pocket. It’s almost mundane, just holding it, but the reality that _he made it from nothing, it came from his head_ chokes you.

_Something more_ : Joseph Kavinsky.

He breaks loose of sleep and laughs, giddy and electric, a second RoboBee pinched between his fingers. You press your finger to the copy-phone; two bees take flight.

“Fucking magic, right?” says Kavinsky, and finishes his beer.

 

Your mother asked you to determine Kavinsky’s sources, and she probably meant for you to do that from behind blast-proof glass, but you’re completing your task from a far more intimate vantage. As if it’s even still a task to be completed, as if there’s any part of you that wouldn’t be binding itself to Kavinsky anyway.

His usual tricks are drugs and drinks, fireworks and fake ids, and he loads you up with laptops, phones, games systems, everything you could have paid for but no longer need to. There’s a part of it that’s tawdry, consumer goods and counterfeits, but that part is drowned out by watching Kavinsky transmute nothing into _something_ , whatever that thing may be.

He can dream for hours, for days, and you disappear with him, ignoring worried texts from Litchfield House in favour of sitting at Kavinsky’s feet while he dreams up chips just to save him from a grocery run. He calls it _theft_ and he calls it _fun_ and you have never known anyone like him in your life, so rough and other, and his crooked grin drinks your delight right in. He wouldn’t be so interested in you if you weren’t so interested in him.

You ask for magic, and he says that’s how Lynch wastes his time, but you’re so sincere and so eager and so ready to be impressed by him that he can’t resist. He starts off from your requests: hair gel with staying power, an iPod with everlasting charge, but he gets creative on his own. He gifts you CDs with weird, ethereal warblings that somehow soothe, chapstick that helps ease the words from your mouth, a bottle of perfume that smells like home, which is something between the incense of your mother’s apartment and the leather seat of a Mitsubishi.

Nothing you need, but so many things to want.

 

He wakes with a live bee crawling over his palm, once. He lets you admire it for half a minute, before trapping it in a half-empty bottle to drown.

“Why would you do that?” you protest. “It was alive!”

“Only because I made it alive,” Kavinsky replies. He tips the bottle up, dead bee hitting the ground in a spill of sour beer.  

“That doesn’t mean you own it,” you insist, and twelve years of debate trophies rise up in you. “It was an independent being.”

He laughs, a hoarse, horrible sound that makes you flinch. A second later, and he seems to realise he’s been conscious too long, takes another pill in hand. He says, “I’ll get you another one.”

He comes back with a hand crawling with wasps, a few dozen that disperse with a lazy shake of his hand. You suppose the replacements are meant to assuage you. Their humming stays with you the next time he sleeps.

 

All of them like the Fisker, even though ‘electric cars aren’t real’.                     

“None of your cars are real,” you object, quite reasonably.

“It doesn’t handle like a proper engine,” Swan tells you, though you wouldn’t really know. You tend to obey speed limits and keep one foot hovering anxiously over the brake. What you call driving is some distance from what they call driving. But if they think your car is fun, you are certainly not going to stand in their way.

They take turns behind the Fisker’s wheel, roaring over backroads and getting fractional seconds of airtime off every little dip on the rough country turf. It’s weird to see your car behaving like a car should, and you are more than content to be crammed in the centre of the backseat to watch. Kavinsky’s friends are now your friends too, especially when they’re sober and not leaning over your shoes.

You try to object to Prokopenko driving, when Prokopenko’s spent the afternoon waging a steady war against his fine motor control and barely winning, but Kavinsky says, “It’ll be fine, it’ll be fucking fine,” and Proko gets into the driver’s seat.

You want to ask _what if he crashes?_ and you do not want to ask that question in front of them, so you just grip the arms of Skov and Swan on either side of you and try not to crash into either of them too heavily when Proko takes a corner too hard. His turn at the wheel is mercifully short.

Your unsurprising favourite is Kavinsky, because he cares the least and makes it look the best. You spend a glorious autumn afternoon with the road clear ahead, watching Kavinsky’s profile, the flashes of teeth whenever he turns back to grin at you, the tendons in his wrist taut with each gear shift and your Fisker purring, growling, roaring, until you’re all as hungry for the road as the engine.

 

It takes longer than you expected for Kavinsky to try it on with you.

You haven’t been in a house like Kavinsky’s before. It takes you about half an hour wandering the templated mansion before the word comes to you; it’s _artless_. Your old home was filled with things your mother loved and things your mother found, tapestries and rugs and antique little braziers. Litchfield House has a sort of art to it, in the way anywhere that’s been properly, thoroughly _lived-in_ does. Kavinsky’s house does not feel lived-in. Kavinsky’s house feels like a place to pass out in and move on from, and it fills you with an unsettling sense of impermanence.

The parts that Kavinsky’s mother haunts, vague imitations of grandeur and luxury, are alternatingly too sterile and filthy, not the kind of space that speaks to your heart at all. Most of Kavinsky’s rooms are the same, cluttered vaults of everything he could think of, vomit matted into the carpet, cigarette stains on the ceilings. The only room of the mansion you can really stand is the basement, and that’s only because Kavinsky is there in person to distract you from it.

Whenever you let yourself in, you feel a little flicker of fear, that you’re an outsider and today is the day they’re all going to notice. The louder the noise from the basement as you descend, the worse your sense of _otherness_ gets, like you’re crashing their party, like they’re finally going to figure out that you belong with the Vancouver crowd, picking the typeface for the yearbook and not in a seedy, cocaine-dusted basement.

They’re playing something neon and violent and unforgiving, their pixelated thug dying and dying and dying and respawning in seconds. Prokopenko looks a little hypnotised. Skov’s playing, Jiang’s telling him how badly he’s doing, and Kavinsky has his legs draped over Swan’s lap, looking as close to content as Kavinsky can get.

He sees you, and there is that single second where you do nothing but wait for him to realize that you do not belong. But he grins and says, “Cheng’s here,” with a kick to Prokopenko to make Proko wave. You’re fine. 

Swan moves to snatch the controller out of Skov’s hands, and you take his place on the couch, comfortably close to Kavinsky. You’ve been crowding up against him all summer, and you don’t mind at all as he wraps an arm around your shoulder and drags you up against him. You could appreciate the proximity a little better if it came without his cigarette-sweat-gasoline cologne, but it’s still right on the line of intimacy that you aspire to.

And then he pushes his luck: the hand on your waist brushing lower, his blunt thumbnail following the grain of your jeans down your hips. You should have expected this, because you know the others are all _his_ , but it still takes you by surprise and surprise stops you from mediating your reaction. You are statue-still in half a breath, shoulders locked and rigid, and you know you could probably use words and say _no,_ only your training presses down heavy, says _keep your mouth shut_ and _wait it out_.

At least Kavinsky’s sober enough to notice the thorny tension wrapped twice around your throat, at least he’s in the mood to pull back, just enough, and ask, “You don’t like that?”

Everyone else is keeping their eyes on the television. Everyone else is listening. You swallow too hard, and someone better with words might know a neat way out of this, but you don’t. You manage, “I don’t think I‘ll ever like that, from anyone,” the mundane truth, your white-knuckled fists pressed hard into your thighs.

One of the others snorts, but the rest stay silent. Kavinsky’s hand still sits hot as a branding iron on your hip, and you want to hiss out steam, but you don’t. The thought circling your head is that Kavinsky knows you, and knows your pieces, the parts that are missing, that he’s not patient but maybe, maybe, maybe. What would you even do, if he pushed it? Training cracks up through your cerebrum; you would keep your mouth shut and wait it out.

“Proko,” Kavinsky calls instead, and you’re off the hook just like that, still pressed against his side, feeling his thighs part to make room for Proko’s shoulders. You fix your gaze on the television, neon bloody nothings playing out in high definition, and your thoughts are watery with relief and gratitude and that small swell of feeling that this is enough, you are enough, you can have this much, just for now.  

 

No one in Henrietta calls you Henry. The Aglionby boys only use surnames, out of tradition, out of camaraderie, some complicated mix of mockery and sincerity to the ritual of only using family names. Kavinsky calls you Cheng like a summons he can’t imagine you not answering, with derision and fondness and a condescending sort of love. You have achieved your aim completely, and you are going to keep that to yourself.

Richard Gansey walks shoulder to shoulder with Lynch and Parrish, an insurmountable wall of confidence and drive. You think you might love him; you think you might not ever get near him. Declan Lynch shows up with bruises and blames it on burglars and you know someone got to him, and you know that he will never, ever answer your questions.

You think _Mother, I’m sorry_ , and condemn yourself to failure. She’ll be furious. It’s better than what her people would do to get at the inside of Kavinsky’s head. She shouldn’t have expected much from you anyway; you’ve always been the odd one, you’ve always struggled, you have always met academic expectations and absolutely no others. She shouldn’t be surprised that you’ve failed at something with a social component. You should be contrite and conciliatory, on the back foot and ready to appease.

You feel like your veins are threaded with gold. You won’t tell her that.

 

Kavinsky dreams up swarms.

They hum and drone and blanket the air around you, and none of them sting, but they could, you know, they’re waiting. There is no one but you and him and a thousand bees, and you stand so still as they crawl over your skin. You don’t know if he’s mocking you, trying to scare you, or if this, from Kavinsky, is just another gift.

Through the cloud, you can see the black lens of Kavinsky’s shades, as dense as any compound eye. A bee circles the shell of your left ear. You don’t breathe.

You decide to take this as a gift.

 

You’re the one to crash the Fisker on Kavinsky’s strip. Your father is furious – don’t you know what it _costs_? _–_ but apparently it didn’t cost so much you can’t get a new one.

“See?” Kavinsky tell you. “Everything can be replaced.”

You still don’t have the vocabulary to disagree with him. You try anyway.

“It’s not the same,” you say, and it’s just you and him in the basement, you and him in front of the static roar of the shattered tv. “It’s a _new_ thing, it doesn’t erase what happened. It doesn’t undo the harm that was done.”

You are too earnest, and you can see a half second of guilt swimming in his eyes, at least one name you’re not going to say but he knows, you know, everyone knows. You saw him shoot at the back of someone's head once, and he missed, but not intentionally. He drove along the railroad tracks, once, headlong towards a train, and if Swan hadn’t managed to grab the wheel, you would have all been pulpy mince. He’d laughed after, like it was a prank. It had taken days for the others to start laughing with him.

There is one moment reflected between you, and then he slides his shades back on, leaving you and your fear on the other side. He says, “Loosen up,” with scalding insincerity, and you clench your fists because you still think if you had the words, you’d be able to save him.

 

Your first impression of Henrietta was accurate; the town is too small to hide how the mountains of the horizon cup the city in their cage.

Kavinsky circles the edges like an underfed tiger, and he’s too big for this place, you all are. Henrietta seems to exist just for Aglionby, a special kind of teenage limbo, and you know when you’re done with it, none of you will be coming back. You wonder where you’ll go. You wonder where Kavinsky will go; there’s not anywhere in the world big enough to hold him.

You worry about it, and he claps you on the shoulder and gives you drinks and tells you to relax, and his eyes are searching, searching, burning.

 

This is what you have:

A place with Kavinsky, a taste of his magic, his laugh, a flash of his gold tooth when he smiles, your name said so familiar, your name said like you’re kin. A full four seasons together, Virginia in every colour, glimpsed through car windows as you go exactly nowhere. Hands on your back and your sides and your neck, fingers running through your hair and over your shoulders, heavy touches that lighten when they get too much. Five friends to keep everyone else at bay, to make you think _if I’d had this when I was younger_ , your brutal childhood nothing but a bad taste in your mouth, feeling invincible every single day.

Something easy and inexplicable. Flecks of ash drifting from a fire that you helped to start because you wanted to, just once.

This is what you lose.

 

After Kavinsky – and there is an after Kavinsky, even though parts of you refuse to believe it, even though all of you aches in ways you will never know the words for – you get a message from your mother.

_You’re closest,_ she writes. _You can go through his things before the others arrive_.

It’s about as callous as you expect from her, but it still stings. You are not yet ready to go through his things, and you don’t think you ever will be, but the vultures are coming, and it’s not worth your mother’s ire if they’re first to pick over the carcass.

You take a designer duffle bag to his house, and you even bother to ring the doorbell, though you’ve never known Kavinsky’s mother to answer. You’re not sure she even knows; you think the sheriff’s office can handle that conversation. You let yourself in, and you have never been more _other_ than this, a live boy in a dead boy’s house.

You spend an hour shuffling half-heartedly through the upstairs rooms, picking up anything you know your mother will be interested in, anything that she can sell; the pills and the powders, the unlabelled bottles, the actual rarities, the ones that are just from _him_. None of them seem very special anymore. They are fragments, distractions that weren’t enough, and you shove thousands of imagined, identical bills into your duffle with an awful numbness.

Everyone who ever came into contact with him agreed that Kavinsky was the worst. He still had what they wanted, and they still went to him. He had something you didn’t know how to get any other way. You still don’t know what he needed.

You save the basement for last. The huge screen is still playing white noise, and you don’t mind the cluttered backdrop for once. None of your friends – his friends – will ever be back here. They’re gathered around Proko’s hospital bed, and when Skov and Swan and Jiang realise they’re down to three, you think they’ll stick tight, try to stay together, try to forget the pyroclasm of Kavinsky in their lives.

You do not intend to forget. There’s nothing in the basement to take, nothing you want, so you just sit on the couch, burning static into your retinas, trying to reinforce the memories. You had magic, for a while. Someone who knew you down to your fragile bones. You wish there was something to take, but it’s just empty bottles and cigarette stubs, spatters on the carpet and empty, empty space.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed it! I'd love to know what you thought! Feel free to hit me up on [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/)!


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